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Napster Clone With Pay Per Download
Judg3 writes " This story over at Wired.Com talks about a new Napster clone with a twist, pay per download. Yep, thats right. MoJoNation offers a "cross between Napster and eBay," says Jim McCoy, the 30-year-old CEO of Autonomous Zone Industries, the makers of Mojo.
They want to create the first file-sharing economy of agents, servers, and search engines in which senders and receivers can agree on prices for each transaction and use micropayments to get paid.
These payments are called (aptly enough) mojo. Their web page doesnt say much, well ok it says nothing. But theres some activity over at SourceForge. Though not a whole lot." Micropayments are definitely a holy grail for the internet: It could affect web pages too: I'd pay a micro-payment to yank banner ads from websites I frequent. And I'd pay a few cents to download a new track. The last question is how micro is micro enough? A half cent per web page? A Quarter per audio track?
Come on, it isn't that hard. Send the track encoded with RC5 (or your favorite block cipher), and only after the recipient has acknowledged receipt of the entire track and paid for it, send the decryption key.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Digital cash is data representing and redeeemable a certain amount of money, which is very hard to forge and, once created, can be passed from person to person without contacting the service which creates and manages it. Digital cash can be stolen if you send the data over insecure channels, or store it on an insecure machine as the provider will pay the real money to anyone who presents the digital cash.
Your apparent idea of "digital cash" which doesn't represent a fixed amount of a real-life commodity is absurd. It is to my description above as monopoly money is to bank notes: an amusing toy, possibly mistaken for money by small children, but of no real value.
Internet-available account transfer services (meaning, you contact the service every time you want to send money to someone, and you can contact them to confirm that you've received it) are sufficient, and they are available. E-gold is an example (it is also a peer-to-peer system which allows micropayments and works with any SSL-supporting web browser). There are still security risks, but you only need one secure line, instead of establishing a secure line with every person you want to send money to.
What do you mean by "open source" anyway? Neither of these systems necessarily requires special software on the client side, so there's nothing that needs open-sourcing.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Hardly naivete -- this was precisely my point.
RIAA need no longer grease radiostations, who in turn also collect from advertisers, but can get music in my ears at lower cost to them, so RIAA can vend their services and related IP products. By artbitraging the chain of distribution, the market is helped on both sides. It is true that the poor radio stations will suffer somewhat, for this devalues the amount they can charge for ads, but so what?
Cybergold does this in a slightly different way, yes, but its the same notion -- the net makes it possible to broker our attention, a commidity for which *WE* can now charge, so that relevant product gets into our hands more and more cheaply, and we are compensated for the inconvenience of previewing products in which we have no interest.
I don't envision the market actually paying for (and abiding by) license-to-use until we have some sort of never-degrading, indestructible (or at least, trivially easy to back up) medium for holding the licensed product.
But we don't have that now. I don't expect the RIAA to give me a new CD when mine gets a skip.
Maybe the micropayment services could compete with one another for your business by offering various guarantees for the replacement of lost media. They could easily recoup the cost of this by selling the list of stuff you bought to some ad people.
In the future...we hope
That's no reason to use them now. I don't care what they do might possibly do in the future, or what their hopes and dreams are, I care about the service they are providing now, which basically sucks.
Well give youself a pat on the back for being skeptical, but let me ask you this, oh trusting e-gold user. How do you know that e-gold ACTUALLY backs up your deposits with real metal? Have you seen it? Are they audited by a third party?
With e-gold's old system, anyone was permitted to go see it. With their new system, they are audited by a very well-respected 3rd party. Furthermore, you can have them send you a check for the amount in your account, and you'll usually be communicating with the person you're sending the money to, so you immediately know whether or not the money was transferred. They can only screw you once before you realize it (this is the basis of most trust: if they screw you once, you can sick the cops on them, if that doesn't work, they lose all the future profit from your business anyway).
These fairtunes guys, OTOH, are asking you to trust that they'll send your money through, with no way for you to confirm that they sent it, and no 3rd party observers of any kind.
They could cheat you and the musicians over and over again and probably get away with it.
So why should we trust them?
Right... and all I need to do in that case as the patron is track down each artist's home page, and then manually transfer money from my e-gold account to theirs, not to mention I have to have an e-gold account in the first place. Quite a lot of work for micropayments, no? Ditto with PayPal.
If the musicians were interested in doing this, the best source for their music would be their homepage.
A directory of musician's home pages with free music and e-gold payment forms would be fairly easy to set up and more convenient to use than a Napster/Fairtunes combination. It would also be more trustworthy and provide better MP3 downloads. Filling out the transfer forms would be something to do while you download the files (whether the ones you're donating for, or new ones while you donate for ones you've downloaded in the past).
At any rate, paying through e-gold is simpler than the forms you have to fill out at Fairtunes.
This may come as a shock, but musicians' music is being freely distributed as we speak, without their permission!
Some of them are also trying to sue people who are distributing it. They certainly aren't helping the distribution process, by distributing well-made MP3s. I would rather pay people who don't try to hold a legal stick over my head and who help the free distribution process, to encourage others to do the same.
If you want to know where my sympathies lie, read my essay on the economics of giving products away and asking for donations. I think it is important to reserve your donation money for people who ask for it. It is also important for them to disclose how much they are getting in this manner, so others can see that what they are doing is profitable and follow their lead.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Since I'm not sure a pay-service would compete well with a multitude of free services, I can't really comment on the viability of such a system.
I have a hunch that if it caught on, it would do more to make money for those violating copyright, more than to support actual artists.
As for Rob's comments on micropayments to remove ads, I think that's a step backwards. I, at least, do not want to pay to read cnn.com, slashdot.org, or any of the other web sites. If they wish to place ads, that's fine. My proxy does an excellent jobs of removing them from webpages, and it doesn't cost anything.
If web hits were to cost money, they would quickly accumulate into a ridiculous amount, for anyone that utilizes the web for anything useful.
I can see how people with a vested interest in direct payment for web traffic would support such things, since it would mean a guranteed income of a size greater than ad revenue, for practically every site. Especially given the devaluation of ads by the commodity nature of internet traffic.
For the actual people involved, paying out of the pocket seems less desirable.
While there is a trust issue with Fairtunes (I'm not accusing, but there's no reason to trust strangers who say they'll pass along money honestly when nobody can check whether they did), the point was that there are cheaper ways to transfer money even though this is a non-profit service.
I'm in on the same side, philosophically, as you guys (don't believe me? read this!), I just see it as a poor execution of a good idea.
BTW, I'm also Canadian. That's why I offer to take donations on my site with e-gold but not PayPals.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Now this is an interesting wrinkle on the whole Napster game. I wonder what "the free market" would say a fair price is for a single song on MP3? Especially given that the ISP charges/transmittal costs are cycling towards zero (on the margin anyway).
Just a thought from an errant economist.
ELITISM: It's always lonely at the top. Uninvited company is rarely welcome.
Anything that makes the net exclusive--at all--is bad, bad, bad. I mean, making it so that people in poor countries can't afford to surf the net is just bloody wrong. We may just be talking pennies--or fractions of pennies--per page, but it would still add up, to the point where some people jsut couldn't afford it. Not to mention that if you didn't own a credit card, well, sorry, no internet for you. But mostly, it's just the idea. Paying for the net--ugh. That's the point of the internet--it's free. That's what makes it better than your local newspaper. It's free, and it's FREE. Damn, I hate this idea!
If Napster had the RIAA wetting itself, these new developments probably mean they need to buy new underwear.
The whole "Shutting down Napster" thing is something of a Red Herring. Allow me to pose a few questions and you will see why.
1)How much money per album/single do bands get?
2)How much does it cost to record an album?
3)How much do record companies make from an album/single?
4) What, in fact, are record companies for?
Bands get very little money per CD sold. Rolayties rarely run to as much as £1 (US$1.50). Recording is expensive, but not prohibitivly so. The biggest bar-to-entry into the music industry is getting signed by a company. Why? Because record labels do the distribution and the promotion. They also get most of the money. If you don't have a label, you have to be <b>very</b> lucky.
OK, now picture a new scenario. I record my songs for £1000 (US$1500). I sign up to an online distributer. They sell my songs for download for 35p (50c). I get 90% of that, £3.80 (US$5.40
) for a 12-track album. I'm richer, the service is richer, the consumer is richer, the record company loses.
That is, perhaps, the future of music. The RIAA is scared that it will be cut out as the middleman. If a service come about where performers could sell direct to the public, it is bound to be a hit. I'm sure many of the big-boys would swich to it, were it not for their slave-contracts with the record companies.
The system would require separate uploader (artist)and downloader (customer) registration, but I'm sure it's the way forward. The RIAA know this, and want in on it. That is why they will persue their competitors, like Napster. THey want to be the only companies capable of offereing ths service, to keep tying bands into their contracts at less favourable terms.
Will it work? I think so, unfortunatly. The commercialzation of the Inernat may be inevitable, but we don't have to like it.
These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined. -- Homer Simpson
Great, let's give the UN one more reason to invade...
My mom is not a Karma whore!
If you would like to send Rob money, monthly, I don't see why you don't just do it now.
The "knee-jerk" reaction here, is that because you find Slashdot valuable enough to pay a subscription fee, it's alien to you that someone might not want to.
A volunteer system of payment is acceptable for something like slashdot (plus its ads, but I too, like the parent, filter them out...I wouldn't click them anyway.), even if it isn't a viable economic model for information.
Quite frankly Slashdot doesn't provide a service that justifies any payment, in my opinion. Its news model is based upon submissions from readers, which end up linking to other sites, like CNN or ZDNET.
Its comment system provides nothing more than usenet or mailing lists, except that it's centralized around links to articles on these other sites, and mindless editorials constructed to increase ad revenue. Plus you get the added advantage of being for all intents and purposes censored by its elitest moderation system.
So while you may find its storage, or the content worth paying for, please don't attempt to force your values on me. Rob took a hobby, and for all intents and purposes, sold its userbase to a company for millions of dollars, and continued employment.
It is great as a pseudo-free service, but it'd be a cold day in hell that I'd have a credit card, very much used it to pay micropayments to read OOG's adventures. I'd be more apt to pay the author than Rob Malda for OOG's tales.
I'd be more apt to pay CNN for *THEIR* articles, than I would Slashdot. (But news should be free, anyway)
1.The money is worth more to us in the hands of an artist than it is in our pockets. We'd much rather have famous artist X proclaim they got a $100, than for us to have an extra $100 with which to go buy some more pizza.
You'd rather that the Backstreet Boys quietly stuff another $10,000 into their pockets (chump change to them; certainly no reason to call a press conference) than pay off your student loans.
Yeah, right.
You might send it along because you had to, as a matter of ethical and legal obligation, but really given the free choice (someone gave you the money without requiring you to send it someone), I don't believe for a second that you'd donate that large amount of money to a band you don't like. Hence, it is not more valuable to you in their wallets than in yours.
I believe you're probably honest, but you haven't even faced the real temptation of handling that money yet. If you start handling the kind of money that makes pop music superstars take notice, you might find it a lot harder to not skim off a few bucks (or a few tens of thousands) for yourself when nobody's looking.
I see no reason for people to trust you unless you have some competent and trusted auditor looking over your shoulder.
2.If we were stealing your money then why would why charge you a service fee?? Wouldn't we get more money without a service fee?
To make it look as if you're breaking even on donations, rather than the totally unbelievable idea that a couple of university kids are paying 5% of what everybody else does.
If you were running a scam, you would certainly do things like that to make it look like you're honest.
Speak up if you have suggestions on the trust issue.
Fine. Require the musicians in the directory to have a PayPal or e-gold account, and just be a directory to these accounts, never touch the money yourself, or send along real paper checks that you can't cash yourself. That would make you 100% trustworthy.
As for paying for your servers, you have two major choices: advertising, and mass-market busking. Either would work, though I think people would appreciate you choosing the second option (and you are in a uniquely appropriate situation of having a customer base that understands the benefits of paying without being forced).
Actually, I'm planning to do something similar to this (kind of a cross between this and freshmeat.net) at buskware.com (nothing there yet, nor at buskware.org, which will be an advocacy/discussion site for buskware and mass-market busking). However, it will be aimed primarily at computer programs, and more specialized sites for other things (like music) will serve the donors' needs better than one centralized solution.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
> A half cent per web page?
When that happens, the current trend toward two paragraphs per page on a Web site will suddenly become a trend toward two words per page.
And then we'll be back to the old-fashioned penny-per-word style of writing. If you think Katz is a windbag now, wait until he starts getting paid by the word.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
4% plus 25 cents is way too expensive. It makes microdonations infeasible.
And straight out of the FAQ:
If you use something like e-gold, you end up losing about a total of 4% in the put-money-in, transfer, get-money-out sequence, regardless of the size and number of transactions. [...] All the musician needs is to create a free e-gold account and list it on their home page.
Right... and all I need to do in that case as the patron is track down each artist's home page, and then manually transfer money from my e-gold account to theirs, not to mention I have to have an e-gold account in the first place. Quite a lot of work for micropayments, no? Ditto with PayPal.
If they were really serious about providing a service, they'd also list other means by which you can pay the artists directly, instead of insisting that all the money go through their own hands.
Other means like what? I suppose they could list the address of the artist, but you could find that out yourself, the way they do.
Also, read the FAQ, they aren't audited by any third party, and their reasoning for why they wouldn't just pocket the money is very unconvincing
Well give youself a pat on the back for being skeptical, but let me ask you this, oh trusting e-gold user. How do you know that e-gold ACTUALLY backs up your deposits with real metal? Have you seen it? Are they audited by a third party?
Besides, the musicians have not said that they are willing to be paid this way. I would much rather give money to musicians who give permission for their music to be freely distributed.
This may come as a shock, but musicians' music is being freely distributed as we speak, without their permission! What can it hurt to have the musicians benefit some from the distribution of their music, given that it's happenning? Even better, we can leave the record companies out of it like we've always wanted to. How nice...
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Good point. The inconvenience I'm willing to put up with is inversely proportional to how much I have to pay. I was speculating that the proposed service was going to end up charging a significant sum, if only because the copyright holders will want their cut and have grown used to getting, say, a dollar or more per song (never mind that their 'manufacturing' and distribution costs are much lower in an online model). For that kind of money, my tolerance level would be about nonexistent.
Huh? You're confusing me pinkboy ;) All I'm saying is that it'd be annoying to have some slimy little bugger charging people for access to the music which I put up for free... screw tips, my CDs cost way less than RIAA ones and if you buy one you actually _get_ something. Charging people to listen to something is stupid, better to give them something real for it :)
If you have an account, you know it takes about 5 minutes to create one. People don't have one because they don't have a reason to.
The potential number of people with e-gold accounts is larger than the number with credit cards, especially in the demographic who is likely to get the idea behind giving money away. It's hard for a young person to get a credit card, but easy to get and fund an e-gold account.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Who?
Central Group of Ontario is their 3rd-party escrow agent. They know exactly how much gold there is, and they can't touch it without their say-so.
Also how would we integrate the e-gold system into our site? We'd have to have a person manully verifiying everything. Or write some pretty crazy scripts to interface with their website as it currently stands. There is no nice server to integrate into like I can with visa cards.
Absolutely wrong. Didn't you even look into this? It's a payment service! Of course it's designed for automatic verification!
If I wanted to steal money I think there would be a lot better ways of defrauding the public than through our looney scheme of depending on YOUR goodwill.
Hmm, people send you money, without expecting you to do anything that they can check. Sounds like an awfully good scam to me!
Anyway, there's no reason that someone has to be using the best of all possible scams to be running a scam. There's a reason the phrase "criminal mastermind" exists - most criminals aren't.
If you really think we are scamming everyone, we now prominently display how much has been scammed (i mean sent), on our homepage.
...and, of course, you'd record it accurately if you were scamming everybody.
Your whole argument comes down to, "You should trust us because we're telling you to trust us." It doesn't fly.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I see that a lot of slashdotters here have already made up their mind that this project is evil/sucks/is never going to work/dumb. There are tons of reasons why any particular project may succeed or fail but the model behind this one actually looks like it might work.
The way I understand this there are two unrelated "payment" systems involved: the first is a reputation-based system with "Mojo" as its currency. It is designed to increase reliability and reduce the amount of junk on the system. People that have unreliable systems or post junk will have bad reputation and won't get much "Mojo". The other payment system is voluntary, it involves real money and it lets people compensate the producers of the original material, while the Mojo system will only let you pay other users of the system for the storage, CPU and bandwidth involved in distributing the data.
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
How does that benefit the artist? (Assuming of course that the original assumption is correct..) It's all very well to improve the end-users method of hearing the music, but if no-one's paying the author for it...
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
The thing aoubt production of music (#2) is that technoloical advances make it easy/cheap, i.e. if more people buying home studios then home studios become cheaper. Also, development of artist (#1) should really be the job of the artist anywho since the record companies do should a crappy job (ala Britney Spears). Anyway, we can now see that #1 and #2 should be done by the artist while #3 can be done by the fans and the artist.
Finally, copyrights were created to force record companies to compensate artists, but fans supporting artists is a non-issue.. let me repeat that "fans supporting artists is a non-issue." Why? It's pretty fucking simple, no artists == no music, so the fans of Joe Artists will need to pay Joe or Joe will get a day job and the fans will not get much new stuff by Joe. Now, Joe needs to be a savy buisness man to make shure that it's easy for his fans to pay him, but that's not really that difficult.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
"My suggestion is to use an aggregate payment system tied in to a database which allows registered members to exchange credits or points on the system - In other words, you charge up your account ... and can then distribute "points" to anyone else on the system." (From this thread at Hack the Planet)
Confirmation once again that like causes produce like effects, and that all events are products of their times. And what times? An historical inflection point, year zero of a new phase in human society. These ideas are everywhere now, "in everyone's heads". A crucial point: systems like this can only work if they are built on open and non-proprietary foundations, (ie. "platforms without the platform vendors" ie. nobody owns it) So all of these similar initiaves need to become interoperable.
Answer to the first part, charge them when the download is complete. If they dont send an ack for the last packet, double charge them.
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
This way, a dorm-kiddie on a T1 can fill up half of his 60Gig drive with MP3s, connect to Mojo, and watch the mojo karma roll in. I guess it could then be sold off, so you can actually MAKE money on this scheme (by hijacking university bandwidth; hmm...).
I think this is in principle a good idea exactly because it really encourages people to post stuff. I think that almost all recent music would quickly be posted on the site by people fishing for suckers. I think this is great. Napster could still run alongside, sort of the "poor man's trading program," but if you need something really rare, you'd log in on Mojo and pay for it, or, stay logged in on Mojo and hope people download from you so that you don't have to pay.
Problems (many already mentioned here; somewhat redundant):
1. Morons and idiots are still using the Xing mp3 encoder and other inferior products. From the filename and size you don't see how well it was encoded--not until you've paid for it. The system would encourage people to encode their MP3s using the fastest encoders available, which also happen to be the ones producing the most horrible results. (benchmarks). How would we reward good citizens like me who use only LAME 3.8x -V1 -h (which is what everyone with working ears should be using, by the way...)? Sure, it eats up CPU cycles...
2. Here's a get-rich-quick scheme: make up filenames like "Britney Spears-live rare bootleg Sao Paulo98-Pinball Wizard.mp3" That would earn you some uploads! Of course the file itself would be a recording of you lauging (all the way to the bank). So you would need an E-bay type ratings system for each user, that would show a username in red, for example, if they had bad ratings. But if you get bad ratings just use up any credit left in your account, ditch it and start all over again with a clean one, or get your buddy to write compliments like on Ebay. I just don't see how this would self-regulate.
Shit... need to go .. submit!
at 160k and above, lame/blade (the current best free tools) start to excel. but for space savings and overall quality, frau/128 is an ideal compromise.
I'd estimate that I'd have to go to lame@192 (or higher) to equal frau@128. and frankly, mp3 is lossy even at its best; so why not optimize a bit more in the space savings direction; the quality loss is really minimal.
I don't mind the fact that frau is so slow to encode; I only encode once for each song, anyway.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
He wanted to give me a dollar for it, and wasn't sure how that could be arranged. He was quite serious, too- although he had very particular tastes, 'Alleycat' hit him so hard that he felt obliged to pay me for it.
I straightened him out pretty quick ;) first of all, the album 'Alleycat' is on is only $5.99. It has a nice attractive cover and includes other worthy tracks (though none of them are Electric Blues but Alleycat). Six bucks is not a huge amount- he could get the CD.
Failing that, I had the option when I uploaded the track to make it 'streaming only'- which is a joke anyway, but theoretically it could be withheld and people prevented from downloading it. I chose to make it freely downloadable on purpose- you simply can't focus entirely on money because as an artist there's an even more important currency, the currency of attention. It may not make sense to everybody, but I WANT my tracks in the hands of people who absolutely love them. I would rather be paid nothing to have my tune in the hands of someone who just loves it than be paid a dollar to have it stuck on some Zip disk somewhere. There's a future in finding the listeners who love what you do- there's no future in being paid money to get filed away as just another musician.
I have a new track up, 'B17 Flying Fortress' (it went live real quick! Gratifying), which illustrates 'what I would do with money': compare the sound of it with the sound of 'DeHavilland Mosquito'. As usual not everybody might like it but some people probably will :) and as usual, it is available for free download with no expectation beyond that. There's no CD for 'Wounded Skies' yet or even cover art, so you can't buy that ;)
My point is that it's up to me to decide these things. If I decide I want to give music away and simply allow people to pick up a CD if they want to encourage my making more music (and at that, pricing the CD as low as I'm allowed to do), well then I'll do that. It's not stupid- I rate in the upper percentiles of money earners on mp3.com, because a lot of people try to squeeze money out of every little bit of music they do, pricing their CDs really high (and they're only mp3.com CDs) and making everything streaming only, and that doesn't follow the rules for internet business- the 'shelf' is too big and there are too many more generous musicians on the 'shelf' next to 'em, and they end up getting hurt.
By the same token, this micropayment Napster clone sounds crazy to me. I know I've asked for my stuff to be shared on Napster, very publically and explicitly: I can also say that certainly nobody from this new Napster clone has contacted me asking for payment information and where to send the 25 cents. I can only assume that for the most part it is 'Napster Clone in which you pay THEM per download' and I would ask, what's the point in that? I certainly do not want people being made to pay 1/4 cent to download my music when they can download it for no 'micropayment charge' at mp3.com/chrisj and will always be able to (if mp3.com drops the ball on this I will simply find another place to host my music- or an additional, recommended place to host my music)
I'm sorry, but mp3s are not a profit model. They are a promotion model. The idea of doing micropayments on them is repugnant- next someone will be selling a winamp which charges $0.0001 per song played. Who gets this money? Certainly not the artist. It seems that in some ways Internet independent music will be "meet the new boss- same as the old boss" (no STR for CmdrTaco ;) ) and as soon as the old RIAA slimeballs are forced into irrelevance, new slimeballs will be revealed as being there all along, behind the new scene. You'll know them by doing the math- when all the little micropayments add up to $30,000 a day, and the artists get $1000 for Britney Spears, $900 for Backstreet Boys, $800 divided up among everybody else, then you'll know who the new slimeballs are.
I refuse to be a part of the RIAA slimeballs, and I'll refuse to be a part of the replacement slimeballs. If that means crippling my 'career' then so be it. Frankly I doubt it- I think in the modern day being a slimeball becomes a handicap because it's too easily uncovered and the information gets around very quickly. I will be very interested to see if I'm right :)
I apologize for my rudeness in my earlier post, I was annoyed at what seemed like a condescending lecture. I think I perceived it wrong.
That's no reason to use them now. I don't care what they do might possibly do in the future, or what their hopes and dreams are, I care about the service they are providing now, which basically sucks.
Surely you can see the circular reasoning going on here. It's going to continue to suck for as long as no one uses it! We have the advantage of dealing with such small amounts of money--The service charges at this point are worth it to me to make a statement against the music industry, and place a small bet on the off-chance that this fairtunes thing goes big and gets press.
They could cheat you and the musicians over and over again and probably get away with it.
So why should we trust them?
Point taken. Personally, I trust them because I see them to be like me, young idealists who are disenchanted with the industry, and want to put enough time and resources into the project to make a company out of it. Naive? Perhaps, but like I said, there's so little money coming out of my pocket I'm willing to take a chance at the opportunity to make a statement.
At any rate, paying through e-gold is simpler than the forms you have to fill out at Fairtunes.
Fairtunes is also brand new, and since its existence is based on this very idea, it can be tailored to make just this kind of transaction painless. They have plans in the works to write plugins for for the major media players that allow you to tip the artist when you play their song. Who else knows what they could come up with?
And any officially sanctioned scheme like you describe would legally have to involve the record company. So by participating in it I don't achieve my goal of excluding the record company.
Some of them are also trying to sue people who are distributing it.
And I certainly would be less likely to tip musicians who had openly declared war on me.
But think about this: how likely are people going to be to try this until they're shown it works? Stephen King can afford to, and isn't bound by a draconian exclusive contract that forbids him from writing books on his own. I see this as the chance to show them it CAN work, and leave them with less reason to try and litigate against me. Of course the leeches at the RIAA will still try, but how will anyone take their rhetoric about it being "for the artist" seriously if the artists don't support their actions?
...reading your essay now, but there'd be no way to finish it and the comment on it before this discussion thread was dead...
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Don't worry, I read it. The fact still remains, however, that you've never seen the metal, and the principle still remains that everyone must draw a line of trust somewhere, else we lock ourselves in remote dwellings in central Montana and not interact with anyone. Them's the breaks.
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This model will probably come to pass, but this company will not be the one to do it.
.25, since that will hurt their CD sales. Expect $1 - $2/ track charges. Their monopoloy on the licensing of the songs will allow them to do this.
Legally, they will get nailed, just as mp3.com already has (for Beam-It) and Napster will be. Quite simply, they don't own any of the licenses for the music they are trafficking in, much less the users who have simply ripped a few tracks from a CD they own. What legal rights does a pirate have for compensation for his pirated works? Nada.
Postulate. The RIAA companies will initiate such a service soon, after Napster and its competitors have been shut down.
The genie is out of the bottle with regards to mp3 files. No amount of interference can stop the illegal trade of mp3 files amongst users. The best the RIAA companies can do is to act as a middleman. People will be willing to pay a premium to have the service of a Napster-like central repository. Anyone who has used both Napster and Gnutella has realized that Napster's central sercer system is the way to go here in terms of speedy searches, and is superior to Gnutella for the trade of mp3 files. People will be willing to pay a small amount for that service.
The inevitable conclusion is that the RIAA companies may eventually act as middleman between users trading mp3 files. However, they will not offer microcharges as small as
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
How would it be handled with all of those failed/aborted downloads? If it's 10 cents per track, and I get 65% of the track, do I get charged 6.5 cents??
Also, how would they handle the initial population of files? If I use the software, and offer my collection of mp3's (ripped from discs I own), do the copyright holders receive a cut of money that others pay to get my stuff? Do I get anything like credit towards use of the service?
I admit, I haven't delved too deep into their (really, really thin) page, but does the RIAA give their servers all of the files to offer?
Good idea - definitely more palatable to the monopolists than Napster, but it seems like there are a lot of potential shortfalls.... I'm hopeful, though!
any old joe can encode using ... low bit rate blade/lame ... but if I can get Frau. encoded mp3's
Remember, the LAME encoder is thought to be as good as Fraunhofer's and it's Free (but may be illegal because certain necessary and irreplaceable algorithms for creating MP3 data are patented).
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
I think the difference between the Napster debacle and something like alcohol prohibition is that prohibtion took a legal product (alcohol) and made it illegal. The Napster problem focusses on the fact that Napster is accessory to an activity already established to be illegal: unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material. To a musician, making their recorded, copyrighted work available to others at no charge is tanamount to theft of their livlihood and art. And yes, it's illegal. Whether you go out and buy the CD the next day is completely irrelevant if you were never given permission to copy the work in the first place. Think of it this way: if you steal $50 from someone, and send them a check for $500 the next day, you're still guilty of theft. The law doesn't care if the victim is better off in the end. The law is the law. If you don't like the law, stop whining and do something about it. Organize, demonstrate, and vote.
Napster could have been a very useful tool for music lovers, musicians, and the recording industry, but I think it's gotten out of hand. I agree with Lars wholeheartedly, and I think it is the duty of mega-bands to take a stand, because while Metallica won't feel the pinch of lost CD revenue, less successful musicians will. In the end, Napster users are just whining because they want something for nothing, at the expense of artists. Which, as a musician, I find absolutely disgusting.
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All generalizations are false.
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I like to watch.
Even if Napster were shut down, someone would code a copy that hides itself in SMTP packets or something. I've met too many frightening MP3 addicts to believe that we can ever go back to a pre-Napster world. Pay for music? Yeah, right...
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All generalizations are false.
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I like to watch.
Micropayments are definitely a holy grail for the internet
I'm sorry, this makes me sad, perhaps because on the internet I'm a user, not a publisher.
I live in France where for about 15 years they've had this thingy called the Minitel, which is basically a really dysfunctional Internet where you pay by the minute. It sucks pretty big time.
Please, I know things may happen whether we like them or not, but don't you like the free as in beer Internet? Don't you think it's tainted enough by money and commercialism as it is? Don't you see what a horror having to check your wallet whenever you do anything on the internet will be?
I know the term is "micro"payments. That sounds like your wallet doesn't take a significant hit. But don't be fooled.
Do you like highway tolls? Would you like to pay for every little trip you took in your car, more or less according to the hour or the type of road you drive? That kind of scheme already exists, and it's called taxes, and we pay plenty of those already. You want to pay "micro"taxes whenever you scratch your nose?
This makes me sad.
I prefer a model like the "Street Performer Protocol" recently utilized by Stephen King. I'm also fond of voluntary contributions to artists and other creators. What I would not like to see is a huge bazaar where Joe Average gets 5 bucks for trading the latest Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling gets nothing for writing it.
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Meanwhile, there's a lot of nice stuff free at MP3.com - just because it's not from a huge, "popular" artist doesn't mean it's not good.
Me paying them to listen to their music? Are they kidding? Why should I listen to some new piece of crap, when I can hear it on the radio for free?
I expect new market economies to go the other way -- RIAA will have to pay *ME* (as they presently do pay radio stations) to audition streams of their new offerings.
Ultimately, serious market models will have artists (and not big label enterprises) bidding for mindshare, indeed, perhaps paying *US* to listen to samples of their offerings. Those that are great will rise to the top, and then they can charge us for performances, other services and perhaps recordings of that and their later works should we decide we want to hear it upon demand.
Sigh. Thanks for summing up the opinions of the vocal but immature minority, and providing fodder for the arguments of those who oppose the revolution in media delivery. Those who favor conventional methods will fail, but thanks to people like you, I'll still have to buy my CD's at Best Buy for a rediculous $15 for a while.
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Ian Peters
I would pay like a dollar to be promised a high bandwidth download with the song in perfect condition instead of doing time consuming search with half the results only partial songs, or songs with skips or any other deformalitys in them.
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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
So why hasn't Slashdot implemented this? I know I've seen the suggestion brought up before....
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/17/da_rude_vs_mind machine.html
Go there. The "Artist" has a record label.
I think the only way this works is if the RIAA gets a cut of the money and get's to set the rules. Besides why should I pay when I can pay $9.99/month and get unlimited mp3 downloads legally through emusic.com. This way I get a good deal and the musicians get some money for their work,
MojoNation seperates the payment of the creation of the content from the delivery of the content.
Burris
I beleive that what Taco is saying is that, since he runs a site that draws most if not all of its revenue from advertising, it would be hypocritical of him to use Junkbuster to block ads on other sites, thus depriving them of their revenue.
Personally, I'd support micropayments on /., with the notion that there was a periodic cap of say, $5 or $10 per year. What I gain from reading /. far outstrips that payment.
pooptruck
There's a new organization called Fairtunes.com where you can send a mini-payment ($1, $5, etc.) to the musical artist of your choice. It's an attempt at the "tipping jar" model of artist remuneration.
I think it's worth checking out.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Junkbuster has suffers from the same problems as spam-fighting email filters. You are either going to eliminate non-banner ad content or you are going to still get some banner ads. There are no perfect heuristics which will allow you to determine what is a banner ad and what is not.
Let's make an assumption that there WAS such a hueristic and that the Junkbuster 'solution' was widely used. What are some possible results of that?
I can understand many people's dissatisfaction with the current web advertising model, but subverting the means by which the content you enjoy is created is counter productive.
The biggest reason why subscriptions don't work on the net is that there is no way to try them out to know if you are really getting what you want. Me, I was a regular reader of Slate, and actually was one of the few that paid a subscription for it. But I completely understand how hard it would be for anybody else to plunk down their money without ever reading the magazine.
/. ?? Most certainly yes. Even for content I was unsure of I would spring a few cents for. Once! Of course, the micropayments would have to flow through a trusted source...
Now micropayments, on the other hand, are less of a problem. Would I pay $0.01 per day for
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** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
People will pay for content. (At least I regularly do.) But they are generally not interested in paying a random person for a plentiful resource.
What this is is some moron seeing ebay, and seeing Napster, and asking himself how he can cash in on this phenomena without having a clue about what is going on. Some clueburgers.
1. The equivalent is available free.
2. He is at more legal risk than Napster.
What is going to happen is that nobody will bother to show up, and even if they did the lawyers would show up right after. And yet another huckster will be left thinking that he would have made it rich had he just had the right idea before someone else did.
*sigh*
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Autonomous agents? Micropayments? New paradigm of information distribution? Is Nicholas Negroponte[1] somehow involved?
*HEAD EXPLODES*
[1]Negroponte is head of the MIT Media lab and use to write a column in the back of Wired that never failed to mention one of these buzzwords.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
What fun is pirating music if you have to PAY for it?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Would you pay $10 for a free "patch" (most likely Napigator) that lets you use Napster even after the official servers get shut down?
Some people would. God bless eBay.
For more information, click here.
I don't understand why so many people think the Napster model is the way to go in the for-pay distribution business. For all its glories, Napster is, quite frankly, a hassle. Even when I manage to find an offering of what I'm looking for, about 1 in two of my Napster downloads succeed. Not to mention the times that I've invested half an hour in getting something from a person running a 28.8 modem only to have them shut off the machine before the download completes. Why would anyone offering product for money retain a distribution model that relies on a loose confederation of oft-unreliable amateurs? I'm willing to put up with it if it doesn't cost me anything, but if I'm being charged, I want something better. They'll sell a lot more of their stuff if they simply put put the material on a solid server with a nice fat-pipe connection.
By the way, if Napster ever goes off-line, there's a site that provides a browser interface to the Gnutella stuff without your having to run Gnutella itself (take the Napster hassles and multiply by 3 and you have Gnutella). www.gnute.com.
Think of slate.com, for example. Originally a subscription based service, Microsoft gave slate.com's founders (Michael Kinsley-I think??) boatloads of money to get the service up and running and did not require the service to make a profit for several years. However, not enough people came to make it successful and they just recently made the service free.
The only subscription based service that I can think of as doing well is the Motley Fool, which is a finance site. And I think that they offer up to the second info, which makes it so attractive to the stock market set.
Just a final thought if I have to start paying micropayments for content, does that mean I *still* have to pay ISP fees?
This is another view of the world.
Interesting idea, and the thought of paying micro payments to view/hear/whatever content has got me thinking a bit.
:-)
The first problem is that we need an open-source, reliable and secure digital cash protocol for this to work over the entire net. Mojo doesn't seem to fit this bill, because I would imagine (and I am guessing here) that it's going to be just a bunch of CGI's. I also predict that people will use them to launder credit card numbers etc. through them, but anyway....
Once we have a really good digital cash protocol that everybody accepts and starts using, we need to then work out exchange rates dynamically and properly - if the internet currency is different to real currency then the price you pay today for your content will be different to what you paid yesterday.
There is then the problem of security. Ideally we would want a peer-to-peer system whereby your client pays the site directly. The problem here is how does the site get the money back out of the net economy into his bank, and seeing as all he is actually receiving is a string of bits, what is going to stop people printing (or rather sprintf()'ing) their own money?
Because of these issues, we need to get a broker involved somewhere. The broker is going to need to take his cut, and the broker can probably also fix the exchange rates thereby controlling the value of the currency. If the broker wanted to shut out a given country, he could just fix the exchange rate of that country high, etc. That's a lot of power and one that has traditionally fallen with governments rather than companies attempting to make a profit. There may be a conflict in intrests, so maybe the way to do this is to actually get a government to do this, but then we need to ask which one? All very complicated.
It's only after those issues are addressed that we can really start talking about micropayments en masse. This particular site is cute (legally dubious), but it doesn't scale up outside onto the rest of the net. Maybe one day somebody will actually do something about this and the quality of content might even rise. I'd put more hours into my website if I though I was going to get money from it!
I'd pay a micro-payment to yank banner ads from websites I frequent.
The reaction to this statement has been interesting to say the least. Half of the posts I've seen today are responses like "Use junkbuster, stupid", or "Are you too lazy/stupid/ignorant to control what comes down your own connection (that you paid for)?"
Right now, most banners are controlled by some autonomous "advertising service", be it DoubleClick, AdFu (heh), or even some web hosting services (like Yahoo/GeoCities). They're easy to block: they all come from a specific domain; route *.doubleclick.net into oblivion and you're done. Ads have been "tacked on" to sites to increase (or produce) revenue, mainly because its easy for smaller sites to do this than to seek out ad content themselves. All a site owner has to do is sign on with an ad provider, and they're provided with a steady stream of advertisers that wouldn't possibly be interested in them alone.
What if ads were indistinguishable from the regular content, at least in terms of the HTTP semantics? What if slashdot just stuck those Lineo ads in some static content in the front page, pulling lineo.png out of the same directory as a slashdot.png or even that ugly Billy Gates image? Televisions don't change to the "advertising channel" at high noon when the network overlord declares it to be "ad time", why do most websites pull static images from addresses like http://ads.foo.com/annoy-user-with-ad.cgi ?
If ad content was blended seamlessly with a site, then the micropayments idea would make sense, at least to the content provider trying to make a living off of his/her website. The world would get the Slashdot with commercials every ten minutes, while the "subscribers" would see the feature-length HBO version. You're free to ignore the ads, and you're even free to set up a fancy perl script to filter them if you can.
It's the unpredictability of where ads occur that causes them to be viewed, right? I block web ads easily through squid, but I haven't rigged up a device to guess what time television commercials come on to filter those.
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
any old joe can encode using crappy xing or low bit rate blade/lame. even the cd rip might be crappy. and don't even talk about improper setting of id3 tags.
but if I can get Frau. encoded mp3's with clean rips and proper id3 tags; sure, I'd pay micropayments for them.
afterall, encoding with Frau. at 128k takes a lot of compute time to encode with this software. yes, its the best. but on my high end k7 system, it still takes hours to encode a whole cd album. running thru all 400+ of my cd's; well, it takes a rip/encode/name farm just to make finite work of it. even with the linux Frau. version (which is command line and batchable), I'd still pay small amounts for "blessed" and clean copies of mp3's.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Micropayments are just another way for people to turn the Internet into a more common cash-cow media like selling commercials on TV and radio.
If you really want to get rid of banner ads, use an agent like Junkbuster (http://www.junkbuster.com/) or Webwasher (http://www.webwasher.com/).
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
Mojo will rule the formats, for I, Mojo Jojo have created it as the all-powerful format, thereby ensuring that Mojo will rule the formats, which will allow me to carry out my evil scheme!
This is possible because I, Mojo Jojo, created the plan which allowed me to develop the format with which I can conquer Townsville!
(Oh, has anyone got a banana?)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
They want to create the first file-sharing economy of agents, servers, and search engines in which senders and receivers can agree on prices for each transaction and use micropayments to get paid
AMIX (American Information Exchange) was the first "market for paid file sharing" I'm aware of, and I think there have been a few others.
AMIX used a centralized file and transaction server and proprietary software for the clients.
(The latter was an error IMHO. They could have saved a lot of time and money by writing for VT-100-emultaing terminal programs to go cross-platform. Their project started before Mosaic came out, launched and died before commercial use of the Internet, the web, and browsers-as-OS-neutral-platforms rose).
They died for lack of promotion to get a critical mass of merchants and customers involved.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
4% plus 25 cents is way too expensive. It makes microdonations infeasible.
If you use something like e-gold, you end up losing about a total of 4% in the put-money-in, transfer, get-money-out sequence, regardless of the size and number of transactions. So you easily put $20 in, dole it out to hundreds of musicians in pennies, and over $19 would come through. All the musician needs is to create a free e-gold account and list it on their home page.
If you can use PayPal (i.e. if you're American and the music group is American), you can send money for no transfer cost.
If they were really serious about providing a service, they'd also list other means by which you can pay the artists directly, instead of insisting that all the money go through their own hands. Also, read the FAQ, they aren't audited by any third party, and their reasoning for why they wouldn't just pocket the money is very unconvincing (hmm, thousands of dollars going through your service every day to already-rich musicians, many of which you don't listen to and some of the most profitable you actively dislike, but even given the free choice, you'd rather send it to them than pocket it or redirect it to your own favorite musicians. Yeah, right).
Besides, the musicians have not said that they are willing to be paid this way. I would much rather give money to musicians who give permission for their music to be freely distributed.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
My biggest beef isn't encoding, since my computer area is noisy enough to offset any differences between the encoders that I can hear. No, my copmplaint is with people who have ugly ripping errors, gaps, skips, bad intros/outros and whatnot. For chrissakes, people, LISTEN to your freaking rips before you encode, or at least listen to your mp3s before sharing.
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